P. Parrish - The Little Death

“Yeah.”

“My men could do that,” Aubry offered.

Louis looked up. The thought of putting civilians out there in this weather to search for a body, with the remote possibility of also coming across a killer, was crazy. But these were tough guys who knew their land and their rifles. And Aubry had that same look on his face now that Swann had that day back at Dunkin’ Donuts. He wanted to help.

“How many you got?” Louis asked.

“Twenty.”

“We’d appreciate anything they could do, Mr. Aubry.”

Aubry picked up the phone and dialed. Louis heard him ask for a man named Mike, and then he said, “Get the crew ready for a search. We got a lost man out there.”

Louis looked to Swann. He was watching Aubry, clearly still impressed with the man’s command of his world.

“I can’t keep them out too long,” Aubry said when he hung up. “Don’t want to put them or the horses at risk, but I can give you a few hours.”

“Thanks,” Louis said.

Aubry set his walkie-talkie on the table by the fireplace and disappeared into the kitchen. Swann, too restless just to sit and listen to it, went out onto the porch. When Louis went out to the BMW to get Byrne’s kitten, Swann was sitting in one of the rockers, staring off into the darkness.

The house was filled with the smell of chili cooking when Louis went back inside. He installed the cat in the bathroom with its litter box and dish of food.

By the time Aubry came out with a tray with three bowls, Swann had come back inside and was warming by the fire. Louis realized neither of them had eaten all day. Too hungry and too tired to talk, the men ate in silence, sopping up the chili with corn bread as the chatter of the walkie-talkie played in the background.

Every so often, Aubry would pick up the walkie-talkie to answer one of his men’s reports. The men had divided into teams of two, methodically checking each pasture. One team was checking the slough. But Louis knew the Archer Ranch was four thousand acres, and two of the bodies had been found off the ranch. The chances of finding anything were near zero.

Just before eleven, a report came in from one of the men that a horse had been injured and that the area around the slough was becoming too dangerous in the dark.

Aubry looked at Louis and keyed the walkie-talkie. “I don’t want anybody stranded out there. Bring them back in,” he said. “We’ll try again at dawn.”

Louis went in to check on the cat. When he returned to the living room, Swann was back at the wall, staring at David’s painting.

“That’s my favorite one,” Aubry said.

“Where did David do his painting?” Swann asked.

Louis thought it was a strange question. Aubry looked surprised, too.

“They’re oils,” Swann said. “Between that and the turpentine to clean up, it’s messy and smelly.”

“I let him set up a work space out in my stable,” Aubry said. “David stayed over here a lot.”

Louis turned back to the fire, for the first time noticing the three framed photographs on the mantle. The first was Aubry on a horse, the second a middle-aged couple and a small boy-Louis figured they were Jim and Libby Archer with a young David. The last was a hand-tinted portrait of a young man in a western-style dress shirt and string tie. Clear blue eyes, sandy hair, strong jaw, and cleft chin.

He picked up the frame and turned to Aubry. “Is this you?” he asked.

Aubry hesitated and shook his head. “David. Last picture taken,” he said softly. “Libby loved that picture best.”

Louis put the photograph back in its place. He heard again that love in Aubry’s voice, for both the boy and his mother. He saw again the sadness in the man’s eyes. Anyone could plainly see that David Archer was the image of Aubry. Louis thought about asking the question that had been in his head for days, but how did you ask a man you barely knew if he was the real father of another man’s boy?

“You want to see his sketchbooks?” Aubry asked.

Louis caught Swann’s eye. There was no reason to look at David’s work. No reason at all, other than to let Aubry share something he had kept to himself for almost thirty years.

Aubry went to a battered footlocker tucked in a corner and came back with an armful of notebooks. He handed Louis a tattered tan book that cracked when opened to the first page. It was lined, like it was meant for practicing penmanship, but it was filled instead with childish doodles of horses and dogs.

The second book was an old wire-bound red book. Its plain pages, edges tinged yellow with age, showed more drawings of horses and cowboys, but the craftsmanship had grown more assured. As Louis flipped through the pages, he could almost see the boy becoming the artist.

The other books were more of the same, the sketches becoming increasingly mature as David graduated from pencils to charcoal and, in the last book Aubry gave Louis, to pastel chalks.

There were a few portraits-leather-skinned cowboys, a Seminole woman in her rainbow-colored native blouse, and a good likeness of Aubry in a blue shirt that matched his eyes.

But the best drawings were of the land. A pink spoonbill in a blue stream. Russet cows against green palmetto palms. A lilac and dove-gray sky at dawn. A spiky green air plant lodged in the fork of a black-branched live oak. And a long-stalked plant with sprigs of red flowers, each blossom’s tiny devil face carefully rendered.

Louis turned the page. The portrait stopped him cold.

Red hair. Upturned nose. Haughty tilt of the chin. The face was younger and rounder, but the eyes, so cunning and clear, were the same.

God. Sam.

He held the book out to Aubry. “Do you know this girl?”

Aubry peered at the page. “That’s… what’s her name? She was the little gal who worked at Mary Lou’s.”

“Please try to remember, Mr. Aubry.”

Aubry scratched his head. “It was Susie or Sasha. No, I remember. Sosie. That was it. Sosie.”

Louis looked back at the picture, Swann’s voice in his head. People come to Palm Beach to reinvent themselves, and that includes their names. He turned to ask Swann if he knew anything about Sam’s past, but Swann had gone back out onto the porch.

“Did David know her?” Louis asked, turning back to Aubry.

“I suspect so, since he went down the road to Mary Lou’s often enough, and she was a pretty little thing,” Aubry said. “But if you’re asking if she was special to David, I’d have to say no. She wasn’t the kind of girl a boy like David would bring home.”

“Do you know anything else about her?”

“Her dad was a cutter in the cane fields but sliced his leg up in an accident and went to work in the refinery. I remember he got pretty sick with drink, so Sosie had to drop out of school to take care of him. That’s why she was working at Mary Lou’s.”

Louis had a memory of the sad houses outside Clewiston and of that little girl standing in the dusty parking lot of Mary Lou’s.

He could almost imagine what had happened. A pretty girl took up with the local prince. David couldn’t bring her home, so he met her in secret. What had happened that summer in Devil’s Garden, maybe no one would ever know. But David had died there, and Sosie had made it all the way to Palm Beach and transformed herself into Samantha Norris.

Had Sosie killed David? Had Sam killed the others?

But was a woman strong enough to behead a man? Then he remembered what Dr. Steffel had said when he asked her how much strength a decapitation would take. She had told him that if the blade was sharp and the person skilled, “a guy didn’t have to be Conan the Barbarian.”

Louis had been thinking about Reggie at the time. Now he was remembering the fierce power of Sam’s arms wrapped around his back as he made love to her.